thelittlebluetank's TOMY/Trackmaster Steamworks

I did a lot of thinking about whether to start customising my TOMY/Trackmaster stuff after deciding to funnel my Thomas merchandise money solely on TOMY/Trackmaster instead of Wooden or Take 'N Play etc. but after seeing the awesome things this community has achieved I thought I'd give it a go.

Now I'd like to start by saying I'm not a great customiser and that these customs are for my enjoyment only, so they're not going to be up to WETA Workshops standard or anything.

So I started off simple with painting Flying Scotsman's buffers black, as they should be.


After this I decided to take apart my TOMY Thomas and fix the one thing that's always annoyed me about it: the lack of a white running plate.


And finally as I still had the white paint out I thought I'd address the orange-ness of the "Tidmouth Bridge" signal gantry from the "Over/Under Bridge" set by painting the semaphore signals a basecoat of white and using a paint pen to make the girders silver.


That's it for now! Nice to get my first proper post and thread on the forum and nice to get stuck into a bit of customising.

Nice, look forward to seeing more of what you do LittleBlue

Great job, simple but effective. That's how I started out and I'm still not at a high standard (to me anyway) haha.

Reading the title, I was expecting a custom Tomy/TrackMaster layout of the Sodor Steamworks. Somewhat confusing.

If you wish to prevent sloppy painting, you could use tape to protect what you're afraid of messing up.

(09-15-2016, 09:09 AM)DalaGStanator Wrote: Reading the title, I was expecting a custom Tomy/TrackMaster layout of the Sodor Steamworks. Somewhat confusing.

If you wish to prevent sloppy painting, you could use tape to protect what you're afraid of messing up.

Thanks for the feedback. I thought the title would be more interesting and fun than the general "[insert username here]'s modifications". As for the tape as I had said before I'm only making the customs to my satisfaction so I'm not making them to industry standard. I'm sure if I did use tape it'd only end up going even more wrong anyway. I have a knack for that.

Progress has happened!

First off Cranky has arrived so I've had to rejig the entire layout so it now looks like this:


The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've also decided to include 00 model railway figures with the layout to make it more realistic as I have enough to supply both this layout and my model railway if I ever get room to build that up again. Because of this I now have two new destinations:

Farmer McColl's Farm (Complete with stop section for deliveries):


Farmer Trotter's Pig Farm:


And, what with the decision to add the 00 figures, I decided to give my cattle truck some... passengers.


I decided to add a little narrow gauge loop for Mighty Mac (as I only have one NG engine) but what with the idea to use 00 figures and an eye towards expansion I don't think it'll last long. The cool gimmicks of the Trackmaster Revolution sets will have to wait for the time being as they simply can't fit on the layout at this moment in time.

Also, the signal gantry and Thomas are finished and I'm blowing my own trumpet a bit but I'm ecstatic with how they came out.




That's it for now, but new ideas are flowing all the time so stay tuned.

Sweet! The layout looks even better now, and I certainly wasn't expecting you to find the Tomy version of Cranky since we're in such a different time now. I got confused for a moment and thought you found Mighty Mac's coach, even though you already used it in the first photos. Those 00 animals fit perfectly in scale with everything else, and for some reason the whole layout seems to be better than I remember it. Even the signal gantry looks better now, despite the difference being so minor. I hope you'll be able to find the rest of your old items for us to see and enjoy.

Er, shouldn't you add some R13's for Cranky?

What's an R13? Is that a part label?

(09-19-2016, 06:10 AM)DalaGStanator Wrote: What's an R13? Is that a part label?

See "R13" here: https://plarailtrains.files.wordpress.co...tracks.jpg